This is all in the works for a peer-reviewed co-authored journal article but I wanted to blog about it to get thinking and write out my initial reactions.
I’m using Esty’s formula to estimate the original number of dies using Schaefer’s photo archive.
And the results bother me slightly. There are very few singletons. 18 if one includes everything, 12 if one is really feisty and excludes everything that looks a little ‘off’. Statistically for coverage it doesn’t really matter:
The thing that bothers me is the estimate of total dies and the assumption that we’re missing between 33-35 dies. The reason this bothers me is because one of the dies has a number 246 as its symbol. And it feels like the number should be the last die carved, but that is an assumption based on nothing but a sense that if they were going to abandon symbols and do a number, a big number that number would be the last set of dies carved. line of the chart above is how many specimens would need to be observed without any new dies found to make the estimated total number of dies match the number on the coin. It’s 3 times the number of observed coins so far.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 